


Galatea (1999)

by Segolène (SecretSegolene)



Series: Bad endings [2]
Category: Tokyo Babylon
Genre: Bad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:28:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26668216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecretSegolene/pseuds/Segol%C3%A8ne
Summary: -Bad ending-In 1999, what he has lost is not his eye, or a cat, or his mother. Stubborn, Seishirou recognises grief only when cornered. Proud, he learns that lessons taught in retrospect are paid for in advance.Orion eclipses the Pleiades, and sees that stars are far more beautiful when they shine. But remorse cannot restore what was not saved in time, no more than flattery can re-illuminate the sky.
Series: Bad endings [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1985290
Kudos: 4





	Galatea (1999)

Seishirou had not blamed anyone for the loss of his right eye. He felt neither sorrow nor agony when the stray cats he brought in failed to survive, and only a vague disgust as he snapped the neck of each of the starving week-old kittens, one by one in their cardboard box and bedding. 

He had smiled as his left hand ran his mother through, and kissed her on the lips to ease her pain. Through the tests and cruel training he had endured, he could not pinpoint a single shed tear. Seishirou had lost many things by accident or by design, and each time something departed from his life for good, he waved to it mentally and bade it a fair onward journey. To live was to lose, to change and adapt, like the current sweeping over rocks and roots on its free descent from mountainside to estuary. To live was to feel warmth and wind, to taste salt and bury your dead. To live was to use up your surroundings, and to leave footprints in the wet earth.

Now, holding a pale object in his arms that sagged like a sack of wheat in limp rags, Seishirou found that his one good eye stung fiercely from gathered dust and the pain in his chest was nothing like empathy. It was the pure fire of agony, the hard grip of unsalvageable loss. Not an hour before, that object, with its fine torso and slender arms, its dark hair and soft jaw, had had a beating heart and an immovable sense of self. Now, it was simply a corpse.

The lifeless thing was in every visible way an exact copy of what it had been. Medical technology would have the means of simulating the correct organ responses, right down to neural electricity, to mimic an individual who is simply fast asleep. However, as Seishirou now understood with perfect, ironic, clarity - all of that would no longer be enough. 

No science on Earth could bridge the gap between the living Subaru and the dead one; if spirits could draw such a thing, they could not force the separated parts back together. Subaru was a priceless vase that could no longer be restored with glue or with anyone's magic. This lifelike doll, now indistinguishable from a replica, was no longer in any way unique. Seishirou could see no point in even breaking its arm. 

Seishirou had been careless. He had not thought that something of his could break beyond repair. He had not known that it would matter. Suddenly, he wished to see that clear stream flow uphill. He wished through the ice-cold gale within his heart for another chance.

Seishirou bowed to instinct and curled his arms tightly against his chest. Perhaps, if he had been the one to inflict the wound, the loss would not be like this. Perhaps it would not feel like sinew being torn and muscles wrung like old rags, like sand and salt directly on his lungs; it would not feel as if his ribs were splitting into jagged pieces with a steady and blinding force like the laborious dry drag of tectonic plates.

What was the difference between Subaru and a lifeless object? Seishirou laughed as he felt the wash of former ignorance soak through him and he shivered with sudden awareness of the cold. Might as well ask the difference between something and nothing at all. Living, people could be an intrigue or an irritation; dead, they were no more than a burden. And a burden was what grew slowly rigid in Seishirou's arms in the chill of the starless evening. It would cause him neither exasperation, thrill or delight. It needed no name, had no convictions to tirelessly argue, no desires to recklessly pursue. 

Seishirou admired the useless beauty of the body, its feel and weight familiar in his arms. Its eyes were closed; had they been open, Seishirou might have felt mocked by the extent of the thwarted resemblance. Instead he remembered, deliberately, the vitreous irises in a startling green hue, with the pull and push of shadow in their peaks and furrows as the pupils reacted to light. He brushed the corpse's fringe aside as he had done to Subaru countless times. He understood at last why the statue was art and Galatea the miracle. The difference was that miracle; a miracle was all the difference. 

And so, he understood, the stream would never flow uphill. He, even he, could race time only in the direction it had set. There was one fewer miracle now. Across the indifferent dreamscape of humanity, its loss would be noticed as much or as little as one star snuffed out among the countless. However many bodies were broken in grief, whatever acid tears unshed, now or infinitely later, it would never again come to exist.

**Author's Note:**

> _The game of love has no victor. Lying earth in earth, he knew that he had failed._
> 
> [Restart?]


End file.
